Take action — Take care of your health

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All about sensors

4 min readMay 22, 2018

We started counting our steps & floors, calculating our daily burned calories, measuring our heart rate constantly. Some devices even allow us to measure our blood pressure — all to monitor and take care of our health. But what about breathing?

According to EPA, we are inhaling up to 23,000 times a day and as long as we don’t smell or feel that the air around us is obviously bad for our body, we don’t care — of course we don’t…how should we know — except somebody is telling us, like the numerous fitness apps do for sports activities. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an app which tells you the air quality around you?

There is! At least for outdoor air. I already featured the folks from BreezoMeter on my twitter account, when they were showing up in my Google search bar. Apparently, when asking Google for the air quality near you, you’ll find the following card popping up with data provided by BreezoMeter.

I think it is very interesting to have such kind of information. If you go to their live air pollution map, you’ll find additional information and recommendations what to do related to the detected air quality.

But you already know me by now — outdoor air quality is important and a major influence to our health, but I’m more concerned about indoor air quality, which surrounds us most of the time. So, wouldn’t it be cool to have the same also for indoor air quality?

[UPDATE: Just saw, that BreezoMeter and Foobot collaborated to provide not only information about outdoor air quality but also raise the awareness for indoor air pollution. Great to see!]

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want your neighbours to be able to check how the air quality in your home is. No, the idea would be an individualized system — a sensor inside your smart home devices which constantly measures your indoor air quality at home, tells you what to do accordingly, or even better: does it automatically for you. As I already pointed out in a recent blog post of mine, there are devices which already do that, one in particular is very interesting — the Bosch Twinguard smoke detector, which sports a gas sensor to monitor your indoor air quality.

*(retrieved form:* *https://www.bosch-smarthome.com/de/de/produkte/smart-single-solutions/twinguard-starter-set, 2018)*

It comes with a smart phone application, that displays all the relevant information for you and additionally acts as a remote control for the device. So, that’s a neat solution. However, I want to make it accessible for everybody — this kind of information should be right at your finger tip.

The Twinguard is already a step in the right direction and definitely a perfect solution to constantly monitor the air quality inside your home. However, I want to be more flexible — wherever I go, I want to know the air quality around me. The solution? The same sensor inside your phone. The video below shows, how this could look like:

All About Sensors, 2018

Therefore the sensor is able to warn you at any time you are surrounded by bad air quality. iBlades already took a step in this direction with its smart case sporting amongst several features also an indoor air quality sensor. So, if you have one of these Samsung models, you can equip your phone with an indoor air quality sensor and be aware about the air you breathe any time. For all iPhone users — later this year, iBlades will probably launch also an option for you. Check out the video below for more information!

iBlades, 2017

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